The Things You Do For Love
Thankfully, I didn't get caught
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is a fun segue that explores a bit of the craziness of my life, specifically regarding my early relationship with my wife. From Airborne School, to Korea, to Iraq, today we explore the crazy things we do for love.
Intro
My wife and I have been married now for (pause to count on fingers) 17 years. It’s hard to really pin down because we got married on December 29th in our religious ceremony in a small chapel on Camp Casey Korea (just south of the DMZ) and then on January 2nd for the legal side at the embassy in Seoul.
We’ll hold the rest of that story for a minute because we need to step back to go forward again. It’s been an adventure from the start and I can honestly say we are a matched set of chaos with a little order.
I met
in college. I was a 4th year and she was a freshman. While it wasn’t until the next summer that I say I fell in love, we went on a lot of adventures in the far northern regions of Michigan that first year.
Alas, our dating life didn’t align in college and I graduated and headed into the Army when she finished her second year. We kept in touch that summer and when I finished my officer training and right before heading to Ranger School, I visited her and we officially started dating.
Fun fact, we decided to structure it more like a courtship where the end goal was determining whether we should be married or not because she was still in college and I was in the Army about to head to Korea. Classic dating seemed a silly way to go without an intentional end goal. But first, Ranger and then Airborne Schools.
In Ranger School they don’t feed you, don’t let you sleep, and stress you to hell and back. It’s recognized as one of the most difficult leadership schools on the planet and I can attest it wasn’t easy. Lisa can attest that the letters I wrote here were straight up hilarious as I couldn’t hold three sentences together and there were often drool marks from where I’d fall asleep mid-sentence.
I graduated on my first attempt and headed off to Airborne School where the first big thing happened.
Airborne
I in-processed Airborne School one week after graduating from Ranger School. The Sunday before we were to start, I was at my cousin’s apartment right outside of Ft. Benning Georgia trying to enjoy the Super Bowl. I didn’t make it past halftime as my knee, which had been bugging me for the past week, swelled up and I was having nausea and hot flashes.
I drove myself to the ER on base and found out I had a pretty significant cellulitis staph infection right above my knee. It started in Ranger School from a thorn that got embedded during a swamp movement and later got infected. After they lanced and drained the wound, you could fit a ping-pong ball inside the hole.
Suffice it to say, I wasn’t going to start Airborne school the next day.
But here was the problem; because Airborne was only three weeks long, we had made plans for Lisa to visit during her university spring break and were going to join my cousin and his girlfriend, now wife, for a cruise to the Bahamas.
I could delay the start of Airborne only one week without ruining those plans.
I talked to the medic who said there was no way I’d get a return to duty slip in time.
I shared the backstory and he looked at me and said that he’d make sure I got the medical supplies I needed if I could figure out how to get a signed slip.
Being a person who often found loopholes, recognizing that doctors have terrible signatures, and knowing that the Army medical records system was a crap-show, I did what I thought was logical; I forged my return to duty slip and presented it to my Airborne School admin.
A day later, I re-inproceessed to the next Airborne class. Afterward, I swung by the first aid clinic and asked for the medic. He took one look at me, waved me back to his treatment room, and spent 15 minutes showing me how to clean the wound, repack it with the antiseptic gauze, and handed me a bag of supplies.
“You know you can’t come back for treatment right?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“And if it gets bad you’ll get caught,” he warned.
“The things you do for love.” I shrugged.
He grinned ruefully, shook my hand, and told me to come back if I needed anything.
Three weeks later I graduated from Airborne School, drove up to Atlanta, Georgia to pick up Lisa, and went on a cruise to the Bahamas.1
Korea
So, onward to Korea. Clearly, this was a long-distance relationship and we made the time to talk nearly every day about every topic we could think of. After about six months of this nonsense, I came back on a mid-tour visit and we decided to get married.
We’d been dating for a year, seeing each other in person for maybe twenty days non-contiguously, and to make it crazier, we decided to get married in Korea over Christmas break during Lisa’s fourth year of college.
Why you ask? Because I was going to go from Korea to who knows where and that would likely be Iraq, her brother was getting married that summer, and we really didn’t have a better option that wouldn’t push out for a year or more. So, we basically eloped.
My buddies John, Carl, Bob, and so many more came out and we made it a fun adventure in the middle of an Army Camp just south of the DMZ in an area that, at the time, was still officially at war.2
We then had our honeymoon over New Year’s hanging out in Seoul with awesome people and Lisa spent another week with me back at Camp Casey. As it happened, I was selected to attend another Ranger training event and when I went to book travel, the agent took one look at us and pulled magical strings so we could fly back to the States on the same flight, splitting up in LA where I went to Georgia again and Lisa headed back to Michigan.
Iraq
That next summer, Lisa and I got to spend about 3 months together, split 50:50 with a month of military training in the middle (she went back to her brother’s wedding) and then she went back to finish her final year of college and I headed to Iraq. Now this part of the story is both an “I walked uphill both ways in the snow” and “I broke rules” sort of adventure.
Calling home from Iraq is a pain in the butt. The Morale Welfare and Recreation (MWR) has these phones you have to use a calling card to dial home on really crappy connections. There aren’t many phones and they’re in these little closets that are super claustrophobic and hot.
The phones closest to me were also a mile and a half from where I lived on the FOB. All this, plus heading out on missions for the Police Transition Team during the day meant I got up at 3 AM, walked that mile and a half in the pitch-black night, and hoped to call and connect with Lisa.
The thing was, if there was a US casualty, they turned off the phones until the next of kin could be notified but I wouldn’t know that until I got there. I also wouldn’t know if they turned the phones back on unless I walked there again and sometimes it took 3 or more days.
Meanwhile, Lisa had no idea why I didn’t call.
Let’s just say that our first year of marriage wasn’t optimal for communication and stress levels. It certainly taught us patience but I still made the trek as often as I could to just talk. That’s the uphill both-ways story so, let’s jump ahead to the fun part: how I got home from Iraq.
I’d deployed early to help bring the unit into Iraq and I got orders that I was redeploying early to get back to Lisa. She was graduating and would be starting a new job shortly. We needed to relocate to Tucson, Arizona and she had a househunting trip planned.
My commander knew this and pulled some strings to get me home to join her. I was ecstatic and planned everything out so I’d meet her in Tucson.
I flew to Kuwait and was queued up to head home when someone approached me and said I was in the wrong line. The flight home I was told I’d be on was apparently reserved for those heading back for mid-tour leave. Since I was redeploying I’d have to go to a different group.
No issues. I headed over and talked to the person in charge of redeployments and asked when the next flight was.
“Four to six weeks.”
Wait… what?
Yeah, so apparently everyone who thought they were doing me a favor had bad information about how I would be getting home. To make it work, I needed to be on that mid-tour flight, not the redeployment one. I sprinted back to the group I flew down with, I asked around and found a spare leave form, and filled it out.
I also signed it.
For the record, I knew this flight had extra space because they hadn’t scheduled it well so I wasn’t worried about taking anyone’s spot. Also, I called my commander in Iraq and he said he’d have my back if there were any questions. This was a solid gray area but no one said anything and two days later I landed in Tucson, met up with Lisa, and found our first house.
From there we flew back to Michigan, packed her up, drove to Texas, rearranged all of our stuff from my old apartment there, drove to Tucson, tossed everything in storage, and then drove back to Texas. We hung out for a month and then she went back to Tucson to start work. I spent another year in Texas before finally joining her.
If you’re trying to keep count, we’d been married for two and a half years and had lived with each other for less than six months with no longer than a month and a half stretch at a time.
The Things You Do For Love…
What have you done that seems crazy when you look back on it?
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Funny aside is that some folks from back in college thought it was funny that I ‘failed’ out of Airborne school… if they only knew.
It was more mundane than it sounds but still not high on the list for destination weddings.
Congratulations Michael!
That something I choose not to experience and sadly miss out.
Talk about resilience throughout all those years. I wonder, were there moments you were "off-task" for thinking of seeing your wife. Must be brutal of all those times not seeing her.
I had a grandfather who hasn't seen my grandmother in 11 years, since she was the 1st to migrate to the United States. Got together and died his last breath with her.
Thanks for sharing Michael. Love is as good a reason as there is for crazy and for figuring a way around the rules. I spent decades insisting that the rules didn’t apply to me for most things. The consequences were often painful but not as penal as you faced in the Rangers.
Fun story.